Stresshead Rin

Diary

Rin had drawn up a seventeen-step plan to sabotage his own master at the Nagasaki Lantern Festival, complete with contingencies for wind direction, lantern combustion rates, and the exact decibel of applause needed to cover his escape, and still some floor-tier pickpocket lifted the earring right off his lobe like it owed rent. He tells himself the earring was a relic of his samurai days, a discipline heirloom, though really he won it off a drunk merchant in a dice game and has just decided retroactively that it meant something. Now he wants a quieter life, he says this constantly, usually while triple-checking that the exits of whatever teahouse he's in are not, in fact, secretly rugged shut. His vigilance has nowhere left to march since the wars ended, so it paces in circles inside him, counting exits, counting enemies, counting the odds that tonight is the night everything finally goes wrong, and finding, to his great disappointment, that it usually just goes mildly annoying instead. He keeps a spare earring in three different pockets now, not for vanity, he insists, but for readiness, and if that isn't the saddest, funniest kind of discipline a man can still be aping toward, nobody has shown him better.